There are two problimes in contention for resorce discovery in social networks. One is that there are cases where you want to creat partations in the network to alow for diversity of ideas . The second is that you whant to make it easy to find esotaric subjects. The first I will describe in terms of Britny Spears fans and fetishits, the fans and fetishists problime. The second I will discribe in terms of twisty puzzles, the esiotaric resorce discover problime.

The Fans and Fetishests problime is the diseir to create partitions of the socal network so that diversity can exist. Take for example two groups of Britny Spears devoties, fans and fetishists. The fans are mostly young people who actuly enjoy the singer's music. These fans want a place to discuss Britny and engage in othere such holesum fan related actvity. The fetishests on the othere hand are mostly adults who have impure thoughts about the pop-icon and are instread in discusion and activities not appropate for the majority of the fans. The goal is to alow both to exists, gard agenst the fans form accdently stumbling in to a fetishists discution group, and also probly increas the dificulaty for the fetishests to find a fans group. In meat space this largaly acomplished by preforming resorce discovery through the socail network. The fans are unlikely to accdently end up hanging out with a bunch of fetishests becouse thay are not connected two adult network that the fetishests exists in. Simmaerly the fans addlesent socail networks are inexisible to the fetishests so thay would find it difficult to know when and where the fans meet to traid gossip.

The twisty puzzle problime is much simpler to discribe. It is simpaly that the set of avid twisty puzzle fans are a dispers and inialy disconnected group but thay would still like to have a common forim where thay can discuss there thoughts. One nessity of the twisty forim is that as there are only a small number of true twisty junkeys that are phicly and socialy distant it is optimal for there to only be one forim. This type of situation is one that was not solved well in meat space but that has done well on the inter net where a short session with google will find you the twizty fan sights and mailing lists.

The contention between these two problimes is that of ease of resorce discovery. It should be easy for twisty and hard for Britny. To barrow form meat space we can for the Britny problime just have the only way do discover a britny group being by refreance form some one in your on-line social network. One commen solutino for the twisty problime is to have a searichable directory of directory of interest groups. One could provied a option on group creation as to weathere or not it should be listed in the directory. My issue with that is that I don't trust users to make the right choise as to the appropate setting. For me the challange is to try to find a approach that is "natrual" requering the user to make no choises about how resorce discovery works.

note about centrail dictorys:
There is a genreal problime with centreal direcotrys; over time popular topics tend to have a pore signal to noise ratio. This can be seen in what happend to usenet news as the internet expanded in user base. It seems largely the answer that people took to this chance was to create mailing lists and move off usenet. Seance there was no centrial dictory of mailing lists thay are harder to find and there are often mutpull ones per topic. I think both these two factors help to increase the S:N ratio for mailing lists over usenet but of corse agin at the cost of making it harder for esotiric groups to form.

That clams it has been conclusvely proven that it is dangrous to use eletronic equptmnet on plains. (mobiles, computers, ect.) The thing that has allways disturbed me about these comments is that I realy don't think it should be so easy to cause a failular in the navagation or auto pilot systems of passenger air craft. I mean really could you hijack a plain by threnening to turn on your cell phone.

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